“Well… she didn’t,” his father admitted. “But the sky isn’t falling. The ground’s getting ready to blow up. That’s worse. You have no idea how much worse. Nobody has any idea how much worse.”
Marshall cocked his head to one side. “Only you, huh? Only you and Kelly, I mean?”
To his surprise-no, to his astonishment-Dad walked right into it. “That’s right.” His father stuck out his chin and looked stubborn. Heredity, Rob thought. Anybody could see where Vanessa-and Rob, too-got it. He didn’t see it in himself the same way. But then, who ever does?
That was beside the point, though. He rubbed his father’s nose in it the way you rub a puppy’s nose right after it pisses on the rug: “You know what you sound like? You sound like you’re ready for a rubber room-or else for a really rancid TV movie, one. Only you and your sweetheart know The Truth”-he made the capital letters painfully obvious-“and you can’t get anybody to pay attention to you. Give me a break!”
Dad winced. “It’s not like you make it sound,” he mumbled.
“I understand, Lieutenant Ferguson. Please tell me how it is, then.” Now Marshall did his best to impersonate a shrink.
His best must have been good enough. He wasn’t made to be able to do what his father suggested. Dad was laughing when he made the suggestion, though. A good thing he was, too. Marshall didn’t want to mess with him. It wasn’t just training, though Dad had it and Marshall didn’t. Marshall didn’t want to hurt anybody. There were times when Dad did.
Once again, Vanessa got it from him. Marshall might be no threat to make Phi Beta Kappa at UCSB-not as long as the weed held out, anyway-but he was plenty smart enough to keep his big mouth shut on that particular pearl of wisdom.
“Come on, you lazy bums! Get busy!” Damned if Vanessa didn’t make as if to crack the whip.
She had lots of boxes of clothes, which weren’t bad to carry, and of books, which were. Paper seemed to defy the laws of physics. A 1 x 1 x 2 box definitely weighed more than twice as much as a 1 x 1 x 1. Lemuel played macho and carried a 1 x 1 x 1 box of books in each arm-once. After that, he used two arms for one box.
They finished loading about three. Vanessa hugged them all and kissed everybody on the cheek. “Thanks, kiddo,” she told Marshall. Pickles squalled mournfully in the background.
“It’s okay. That’s why you’ve got brothers and other beasts of burden.”
“Yeah, you’re beastly, all right.” She pressed an engraved portrait of Ben Franklin into his hand. “I want to get going. You guys can use this for dinner.”
He started to say they wouldn’t be hungry for a week after all the fast food they’d killed at lunch. He started to, yeah, but he sure didn’t finish. He’d been working hard enough that his appetite was already coming back to life. By dinnertime, he’d be ready to make a pig of himself. A C-note wouldn’t buy prime rib for the crew, but they could do better than Burger King.
He did ask, “Will you have enough to keep you going till you land something in Colorado?”
“One way or another, I’ll make it,” she answered. She went over to their father. He also got a hug and a kiss. He said something, too low for Marshall to catch. Then Vanessa tossed her head, the way Marshall had watched Mom do a million times. That meant Dad had come out with something dumb-again. Was the toss heredity, too, or had Vanessa just watched Mom till she imitated her without even knowing she was doing it?
Asking her wouldn’t be so real smart, either. Again, Marshall kept his mouth shut.
Besides, he could make a shrewd guess about the subject line on that hair-flipping head toss. Five got you ten Dad was going on about the time bomb ticking under Yellowstone. Marshall had poked around online. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe the supervolcano was there. Whether it was likely to go off day after tomorrow-or a week from Tuesday at the latest-was liable to be a different question.
That was how it looked to him, anyhow. He knew how much he didn’t know about volcanoes in general and the Yellowstone supervolcano in particular. By what Google and Wiki told him, though, nobody knew much about supervolcanoes. Not one had gone off in the past umpteen thousand years.
And if none went off in the next umpteen thousand years, that would suit him fine.
Vanessa stuck Pickles on the U-Haul’s front seat and fastened the belt around his carrier. Then she climbed into the cab. She started the truck. It sounded like the beater it was. How far from L.A. to Denver? A thousand miles, plus or minus. After so many thousands already on the odometer, why worry about one more?
Another clunk meant she’d released the hand brake. The emergency brake, Dad still called it. Hardly anybody younger than Dad ever did. But the way the U-Haul farted as it rolled off made Marshall think that wasn’t such a bad name after all. If you needed to use the hand brake in that truck, you might be in an emergency.
He displayed the hundred. “Do we eat dinner, or do we drink it?”
What they did was spend the next ten minutes knocking it back and forth and then splitting the difference. Kirin and cheap tempura went mighty well after moving, and they were all grubby enough that any place fancier than a Japanese greasy spoon wouldn’t have wanted their business anyhow.
“Could be worse.” Marshall didn’t remember he was echoing a book his folks had read to him when he was little. The sentiment seemed to hit the spot as well as the food and the beer.
It did to him, anyhow. His father said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
You knew you were starting to make it in the music business when o uuldn’t fit the whole band and everything you needed for your show into one big old SUV. The members of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles were all bemused to be traveling with two, but there it was. Rob Ferguson knew he was the band cheapskate, but not even he’d said boo when they bought the second vehicle. When it was railroad time, it was railroad time, and that was all there was to it.
They didn’t go out of their way to look outrageous or even flamboyant; Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wasn’t that kind of band. They were just four tired guys in their twenties when they pulled off I-90 and drove south toward the place where they’d crash tonight.
Rob was sitting in the lead SUV’s front passenger seat, which made him navigator and lookout. “There it is!” he said, pointing to the sign on the west side of the street. “Ruby’s Inn.”
“Sweet,” said Justin Nachman, who was driving. The band tried not to stay at the big national chains. With them, you knew what you were getting, all right. That was the good news. More to the point, it was also the bad news. Justin slowed down. Then he muttered under his breath: “Where’d they stick the stupid driveway?”
Rob was about to suggest where they could stick it when Justin found it. Ruby’s turned out to share an entrance with the next motel farther south. The little convoy pulled into the lot.
One of the girls behind the desk, a blonde who’d be porky in another five or ten years, had not a clue concealed anywhere about her person. The other, a skinny brunette, not only knew about the band’s reservations but whistled the start of “Impossible Things Before Breakfast,” one of the tracks from the new album.
Michael Jackson or Mariah Carey would have committed seppuku if an album sold the way Out of the Pond was doing. Well, Michael Jackson was already dead, but you get the picture. For a band like Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles, numbers that would have been disastrous for a big act looked terrific instead. They were making more money on sales from iTunes and the physical CD than they were from live shows, which had never happened before. They’d be able to afford to take some extra time getting their next release just right.
So maybe it wasn’t an enormous surprise that the registration clerk knew one tune or another from Out of the Pond. Nice, yeah. Egoboo, for sure. But maybe not an enormous surprise. “Impossible Things Before Breakfast” wasn’t a single, though. Never had been, never would be. If you knew that one, you not only had the album but you really liked it.